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Why do people plagiarize?

By Ashante InfantryStaff Reporter

Wed., Jan. 16, 2013

Examples of apparently plagiarized work seem to appear throughout Chris Spence’s career, from his dissertation, to his speeches, to his books. The former Toronto District School Board director is the latest in a wave of high profile accused word thieves.

Over the last 18 months, a host of German politicians, including the education minister, have been accused of plagiarizing their doctoral dissertations.

Fareed Zakaria. (Alex Wong / GETTY IMAGES)

Jonah Lehrer.

Toronto District School Board director Chris Spence apologized, then resigned, last week for passing off others' writing as his own. (VINCE TALOTTA / TORONTO STAR)

CNN suspended host Fareed Zakaria for a month last summer after acknowledging that he copied portions of a New Yorker essay. And last year, Rhodes scholar and neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer was fired from his New Yorker gig after fabricating Bob Dylan quotes in his book on creativity.

The high profile of the writing meant the transgressions were at great risk of being exposed. So what possesses people to copy the work of others?

“When plagiarists were being honest with me they would tell stories about wanting people to like them, being really impressed by the work, wanting to impress,” said New Orleans-based writer Jonathan Bailey who launched www.plagiarismtoday.com in 2005 after finding his short stories and poetry being widely copied online.

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“There was an element of lack of self esteem and self confidence in their work. I’m not saying that what I was writing was particularly great, but apparently it was good enough for them to feel it was better than what they could do.”

Other factors included laziness and the pressures of competitive journalism and elite university campuses, he said.

“In some cases, when looking at these career plagiarists it’s that it just became a bizarre habit for them. They started out doing one minor infringement, maybe they made a mistake or did it absentmindedly, and didn’t get caught for it and it became a part of their writing.”

Jason Chu, the Oakland, Calif.-based editor of www.plagiarism.org , calls plagiarism a consequence of “putting outcomes ahead of process,” particularly among students. He cited studies showing that nearly one in three pupils admitted using online material verbatim in their assignments.

“When students are asked about why it is that they plagiarize . . . what comes to light is that they don’t think that the professor or instructor really cares about the assignment. There really is this push for outcomes, for grades and that de-emphasizes the focus on learning.”

In the matter of Spence though, Chu sees “a very political type of move.”

“It sounds like he’s trying to create this persona for himself and he’s leveraging what he can to make himself sound the way that he thinks someone of this stature should sound.”

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Chu’s website, which serves as a plagiarism information resource, does hear from well-meaning students with “grey area” concerns, such how to properly cite a professor’s PowerPoint presentation in their work.

It’s that murkier aspect of attribution that Ryerson University instructor Lisa Taylor explores in her Ethics and Law in the Practice of Journalism course, which Spence pledged to enroll in as part of his penance for plagiarizing.

“’Do I take someone else’s work word-for-word at length and put it in my own story with my own byline?’ is pretty much a no-brainer,” she said. “The plagiarism stuff that I look at in the classes would be the stuff that’s a bit more on the outer edges, such as online aggregation and curation. Students don’t always understand that if they take the same idea, or lead, and go in the same direction, but use different words and sources that that still may be plagiarism.”

Bailey discovered more than 700 instances of his horror literature being lifted and in some cases submitted to professional and academic institutions, primarily by young men aged 15 to 30.

“My main goal was to get the plagiarized copies taken down, because I was getting people emailing me accusing me of being the plagiarist,” said the 32-year-old. “It was very bizarre, I would approach people and they would respond with anger and disgust that I would make this accusation against them; especially if the allegation became public, like in a forum. They would double down and say that they had not done it and fight back in a very hard way; even if the evidence painstakingly clear, because I had time and date stamps on everything I’d written.”

But he takes comfort in the unearthing of misdeeds by the likes of the German politicians, author Lehrer and Spence in addressing the issue.

“It shows that if you build a career on plagiarism at some point the house of cards is going to come down.”

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